by Vaseem Khan
Chopra scanned the red-lettered notice, picking out key sentences. FAILURE TO PAY; NULL AND VOID, and, finally, YOUR COVER HAS BEEN TERMINATED. He looked up to meet the producer’s watery gaze. “There’s something else I need to know. Two days ago I went to meet Vicky’s kidnappers, to deliver the ransom. But the police turned up and ruined everything. Before you showed me this insurance notice I thought that, perhaps, it was you who had put them on to me. That you knew about the exchange and tried to derail Vicky’s rescue.” The question of how ACP Rao had arrived at the ransom drop had now taken on great significance for Chopra. Because if it wasn’t Das or his people then it meant someone else had tipped off the cops. But who would want to sabotage the ransom exchange? And why? Whoever it was represented a hidden danger, a snake waiting in the grass, and before he could move forward he had to uncover the snake’s identity.
“I admit,” said Das, “after you came to see me my suspicions were raised, particularly when you asked me about Pyarelal and beating Vicky. So I asked Pyarelal to have you followed. He saw you go to Bijli’s home, a private detective. I guessed then what I already suspected: that Vicky was missing and not ill, as she claimed. I hoped you might lead us to him. But we didn’t know about any kidnapping or a ransom. Pyarelal lost you in traffic two nights ago; he’s been looking for you since.” He held up the revolver. “Find Vicky. Find him before I’m forced to use this, Chopra. My life is in your hands.”
Chopra swung the Tata Venture to a halt beside the road.
A homeless man swaddled in rags slept fitfully on a filthy potato sack, his knees curled up to his chin. Beside him a stray dog with patchy fur and prominent ribs also slept, one leg raised in the air, as if poised in a dream. A palm tree stretched up into the night above, a full moon visible between the splayed fronds.
Chopra took out the mobile phone Poppy had given him.
As he was leaving Das’s home he had passed a succession of old film posters, and this had once again returned his thoughts to the mysterious woman in the poster at Aaliya Ghazi’s home. Das’s revelation regarding the defunct insurance policy had all but convinced Chopra of the producer’s innocence. He had to look elsewhere for the true motive behind the abduction. His old policeman’s instincts were screaming at him that the woman in the poster was somehow integral to the case—he had ignored them long enough.
He dialled Cyrus Dinshaw at the Goldspot Cinema. “Queen of the Kohinoor Circus. There was an actress in it whose name I can’t remember.”
He heard Dinshaw noisily pulling old movie catalogues from his shelves and dusting them off. “Ah, yes,” he said, eventually, “Ayesha Azmi. Started her career with a bang, but it fizzled out in short order. There was a scandal, if I recall, all hush-hush, and then she dropped out of sight altogether.”
“What sort of scandal?”
He heard Dinshaw scratching his chin. “I’m afraid that’s stretching even my memory. Besides, she was never a big star… Wait a minute! It was something to do with Bijli, Bijli Verma. Yes, I remember now. That husband of hers, Jignesh, he had some sort of thing with this woman. Got her pregnant, then dropped her like a hot coal as soon as Bijli appeared on the scene. At least that was the gossip. It never made it into the press, so I never knew the exact details.”
“What happened to the woman, Ayesha?”
“No idea. She vanished from the industry.”
“And the child?”
“Probably got rid of it. I doubt she’d have been foolish enough to keep it. Not much call for a pregnant single mother as a heroine. Not in those days. What’s this about, Chopra?”
“I’ll tell you when I see you.”
Chopra tapped the phone against his leg. So, his intuition had proved correct. There was a link between Aaliya Ghazi and Bijli Verma by way of the woman in the poster, Ayesha Azmi. But how exactly were Ayesha, Aaliya, and Ali connected? He could hazard an educated guess, but he would need confirmation from Bijli Verma…
But first he had to discover who had sabotaged the ransom drop. Or perhaps the question, once again, was: who benefited if Vicky never returned?
The phone rang exactly four times before a gruff voice answered. “Chopra? How the hell are you?” Chopra heard a second, louder voice unleashing a torrent of abuse in the background. “Give me a second. Let me step outside.”
Ten seconds later, the voice returned. “What time do you call this?” said Ranjan Ahuja. “You woke up the Dragon.”
“I need your help, old friend.”
Ranjan Ahuja was the General Manager of the eastern division of Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited, Mumbai’s principal telephone-line provider. Chopra had known Ahuja for over a decade, calling upon him when his investigations necessitated tapping the phone lines of local criminals or requisitioning call logs.
Quickly, Chopra explained what he needed.
A smoky silence drifted down the phone as Ahuja lit a cigarette. “You know, I heard about your detective agency. I always thought you were crazy—frying pan into fire and all that. Do you know what I’m going to do when I retire? Not a damned thing. I’ve got a little shack down in Goa. I’m going to sit there all day drinking coconut feni and eating tiger prawns.” He launched into a hacking cough, the phlegm rattling around in his throat. “Let me see what I can do.”
Chopra paced the dark tarmac anxiously as the minutes ticked away. Ganesha paced behind him, watching him with round eyes. “It’s okay, boy,” said Chopra, realising that he was transmitting his restlessness to his young ward. “We’re nearly there.”
His phone rang.
“Have you got a pen?” asked Ahuja.
Chopra scrabbled in his glove compartment.
“So, first, I had to wake up Mishra, the General Manager of MTNL South. I had to promise him a favour—I hope you realise he’ll make my life a misery until he collects. Anyway, Mishra had one of his engineers dig out the call log for CBI headquarters on the evening you wanted, then isolate all the calls going through to Rao’s unit. There weren’t that many, only two between 9 p.m. and 10:45 p.m. Why 10:45? Any later and Rao wouldn’t have had enough time to get from his home in south Mumbai up to Madh Fort by midnight when he arrested you. One of those two calls we can forget about—it came from out of state. The other came in at 10:33 and lasted forty-two seconds. A minute after that a call went from the unit to Rao’s home.” Ahuja paused. “It didn’t take long to trace the caller. Are you ready?”
Chopra wrote down the name and address, the pen wavering in his hand as his astonishment grew.
After Ahuja had hung up he continued to stare at the name scrawled on his notepad. “Well,” he muttered, “that I would not have guessed.”
A LEGAL TWIST
During his long service in the Brihanmumbai Police, Chopra had endured the company of innumerable members of the legal profession; for the most part he had found it a distasteful experience. In India, as in most parts of the world, this particular species of humanity was habitually despised, their very existence cursed. In part, this was a consequence of India’s judicial apparatus, which digested with agonising slowness those victims unfortunate enough to be fed into its ever-ravenous maw—Chopra knew of one case that had been working its way through the courts since the late seventies, a bitter family feud over the will of a paterfamilias who had now been dead so long that no doubt even his shade had given up hovering over proceedings.
Over the years Chopra had routinely fenced with criminal defence advocates in the sweating interview room at the Sahar station or while sitting in the brass-railed witness dock of the Bombay High Court building in Fort. The experience invariably left him with the urge to burn his clothes and scrub himself clean with carbolic soap and a pumice stone.
Now, in his avatar as a private detective, Chopra was becoming acquainted with a new breed of lawyer: the family attorney.
Primogeniture-based land disputes, acrimonious divorces, intrafamilial industrial espionage—it seemed that many imbroglios required a private det
ective. And with each such case, there came the hawkish presence of the family lawyer.
As he rang the doorbell to the plush nineteenth-floor duplex apartment in the luxury Naya Bhavan tower in Cuffe Parade, Chopra steeled himself for the trial ahead.
Kantilal Lal, LL.B., advocate-at-law, opened the door, wearing comfortable slippers and dressed in a red silk robe imprinted with tigers and mythical Garuda birds. His usually immaculate widow’s peak appeared to have slipped the hold of whatever unguent Lal employed to keep it in place and flopped about his forehead. A grey fuzz grizzled his chin. In his trembling fingers was a tumbler of what looked like Scotch.
All in all, Chopra reflected, Lal seemed like a man who had suddenly slipped from the edge, plummeting into personal ruin.
The change was shocking.
“Chopra?” Lal squinted at his unexpected visitor from behind wire-framed spectacles. His jaw slackened, as if he couldn’t quite work out what to say next.
Eventually, he simply walked away, leaving Chopra to follow.
Lal led them through an immaculate white-marbled home. The general theme seemed to be luxuriant austerity—there were few furnishings but what was present shimmered with an air of vast expense.
Chopra expected no less.
In the perfumed suburb of Cuffe Parade wealth and style went arm in arm.
They entered a study panelled in rich oak. Bookshelves crammed with dense tomes lined the walls. A black-and-white blown-up photograph of a younger Lal with a younger Bijli Verma and a man Chopra recognised as her former husband, film producer Jignesh Verma, graced the wall behind an expansive teak desk. Legal volumes made ramparts on the corners of the desk; an anglepoise lamp threw a circle of light onto a notepad.
Lal flopped into the button-back chair behind his desk, leaving Chopra to take the seat opposite. “A little late for house calls, isn’t it?”
“Is something wrong?” Chopra asked. It was not where he had intended to begin, but the change in Lal’s demeanour intrigued him.
Lal gave his visitor a red-eyed look, then swigged from his tumbler. “Vicky Verma is dead. Bijli is inconsolable. I promised her I would get her son back. I have failed her.”
Chopra was taken aback. “How do you know Vicky is dead?”
“It has been two days since you delivered the ransom. If they intended to return him unharmed they would have done so.”
“So you’re certain the kidnappers received the ransom?” said Chopra. The edge in his tone was unmistakeable.
Lal hesitated. He blinked rapidly, emerging from the cloud of semi-drunken melancholia that appeared to have engulfed him. “There has been no contact from them. Or, for that matter, from you. Where did you vanish to? Why didn’t you call?”
“Don’t you know? After all, weren’t you the one who called the CBI to inform them of the exchange? Doesn’t everyone think that I stole the ransom?” continued Chopra acidly. “Tell me, did you know that ACP Rao was my sworn enemy, or was that pure luck?”
Lal raised a trembling hand to push back the straggly fronds of his hair. A terse silence passed. “I had heard about you and Rao,” he admitted, eventually. “From the High Commissioner, when he was telling us about the Koh-i-noor investigation over one of Bijli’s society dinners.” His features became suddenly animated. “It was supposed to be me! I was supposed to be the hero. I have waited thirty years for such an opportunity. Thirty years worshipping at her altar, praying that one day she would notice me. And then, finally, God listens! I was ready to make the ransom exchange, to bring Vicky back to her safe and sound. And then she would have… she would have…” Lal lapsed into silence.
Chopra was beginning to understand.
“How long have you felt this way?” he asked.
“Since the day I first met her,” said Lal. “She was working on a film called Anjali’s Sacrifice. The one in which she plays a prostitute forced to raise the children of her dying sister. I’ve seen it eighty-three times and I still think it’s the best thing she ever did. I was a young lawyer back then. Her agent employed me to look over her contract.” He became animated once more. “She was a vision, Chopra! I still remember everything about her that day, the sari she was wearing, the golden bangles, the way she smelled, the way she moved. Even the way her nose crinkled with distaste when she signed the papers.”
“And does she know how you feel?”
“I have never spoken of it. She is a goddess. I am dust beneath her feet. It has been enough for me to be close to her, to breathe in her essence.”
“How can you stand it?”
“Self-denial has its own exquisite agony.”
“But she knows, doesn’t she?” persisted Chopra. “A woman like that… She can tell. But she’s never given a damn. She’s never once acknowledged that you’ve been carrying a torch for her faithfully down the long, lonely years. Never once given you even the comfort of a smile, a flash of warmth. She’s treated you like the faithful retainer that you are. An employee. A factotum.”
Lal looked miserable. Chopra had hit a nerve. He realised that, as he had walked through the apartment, an absence had registered in the subconscious part of his brain, an absence that now took on new meaning—the absence of others.
Lal lived alone.
With a flash of insight, he felt sure that the old lawyer had never married, had sacrificed his whole life in the forlorn hope that one day the object of his infatuation might return his slavish devotion. In his heart of hearts, the dry, ascetic advocate harboured dreams of an authentic Bollywood ending to his own love story.
“You deliberately sabotaged the ransom exchange,” Chopra said. “How did you know the kidnappers wouldn’t harm Vicky? Your plan to emerge as the hero of the hour would have come to nothing.”
“It was a gamble,” admitted Lal. “I thought Rao would arrest you before the kidnappers revealed themselves. Then I’d be able to rearrange the exchange with you safely out of the way.”
“What if they hadn’t cooperated? What if they had carried out their threat and killed Vicky because you had involved the authorities?”
“Vicky was their only bargaining chip. They would not have killed him. Even kidnappers must operate to a certain logic. At most, they might have taken another ear, or a finger, perhaps.”
“And you were prepared to let that happen?”
Lal grimaced. “Vicky is an arrogant brat. I have watched him grow from a spoilt child into an even more spoilt adult. Whatever misfortune he is undergoing he has brought upon himself.”
Chopra had heard enough.
He stood. “Your actions almost cost me my freedom. Do you think I brought that upon myself too?”
Lal looked up through bloodshot eyes. “I never wanted to involve you in the first place. I advised Bijli against it, but she insisted. As for the CBI—I thought they would detain you for a while, then let you go. After all, you were a policeman, weren’t you? You must know how these things work. If necessary I would have vouched for you. By then, Bijli’s confidence in you would have evaporated, and I could have easily persuaded her to terminate your services.”
“You didn’t anticipate they’d send me to Gouripur, though, did you?” said Chopra bitterly.
Lal’s eyes widened.
He raised his tumbler, then lowered it again. “I am sorry, truly sorry. It was not my intention to harm you. I had no idea things would go so far.”
“Your apology is insufficient,” said Chopra woodenly. “You will have to make amends.”
“How?”
“By telling Bijli Verma the truth.”
An expression of horror overcame the lawyer. “I cannot. She already blames me for the failure to recover her son. If I tell her this, she will banish me. Besides, what good would it do now? Vicky is gone.”
“I believe that Vicky is still alive.”
“What? Where is he?”
“I will soon find out. In the meantime, you must clear my name with Bijli.”
Lal lurched
to his feet, placing both hands on the desk and glaring at Chopra, a sudden fire in his features. “That is unthinkable,” he hissed. “I cannot… cannot—”
“Live without her? You’ll manage.”
“You—you—” stuttered Lal, suddenly furious.
“If you don’t tell her, I will.”
Lal looked aghast. He balled his hands into fists as if he intended to fly at Chopra, but instead swayed on his feet, and then fell, with a clatter, back into his chair. His arms flopped over the sides and his head lolled back. He looked like a man drained of blood.
“There’s something else,” continued Chopra relentlessly. “I have discovered something about Jignesh Verma’s past, something that may have a bearing on the kidnapping. Do you recall a young actress called Ayesha Azmi?”
Lal turned an even greyer shade of ash. “Yes. Why?”
“Many years ago Ayesha had a child. Jignesh Verma’s illegitimate daughter. Can you confirm this?”
Lal looked aghast. “What has that—?”
“Answer the question!”
“Yes.”
“Tell me about them. What happened all those years ago?”
Lal pushed back his hair, and adjusted his spectacles. “The trouble with being a family lawyer is that you become privy to every skeleton, every piece of dirty laundry.” He sighed. “Thirty years ago Jignesh Verma fell in love with an actress. Her name was Ayesha Azmi, and at the time she was just beginning her career. Jignesh was already well known; his father had been a famed producer, and he inherited his legacy. Jignesh was a Hindu; Ayesha a Muslim. In the India of that time, even in Bollywood, this made their affair difficult. Nevertheless, Jignesh defied convention and courted her. She, in turn, was flattered to be wooed by a young man clearly destined for greatness.
